File photo: This product image provided by Amazon shows the Amazon Echo. Yes, voice technology is amazing. You can ask your phone a question. You can talk to your speaker system and book an Uber. With the right setup, your voice can lock the doors, dim the lights and change the thermostat.

Part of the elemental appeal of zombie fiction is the permission it provides to imagine which household item, when pressed, you might use to stove in the face of a lunging, undead version of Mrs Brown from No 37. In the glare of such an apocalypse, familiar domestic items such as tea towels, cafetieres and loo brushes must be reappraised, their value now dependent on their ability to cause brain damage rather than efficiently dry a plate, deliver coffee, or clean the glum residue from a toilet bowl. Do you reach for the bread knife (rasping, noble), or the biro (intimate, cruel)? The 17-year-old film Battle Royale further elevated the premise. In the film a busload of high school students are gassed and delivered to a remote island.

Knowing that an AI wrote Sunspring makes the movie more fun to watch, especially once you know how the cast and crew put it together. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge, where contestants are given a set of prompts (mostly props and lines) that have to appear in a movie they make over the next two days. Sharp's longtime collaborator, Ross Goodwin, is an AI researcher at New York University, and he supplied the movie's AI writer, initially called Jetson. As the cast gathered around a tiny printer, Benjamin spat out the screenplay, complete with almost impossible stage directions like "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor." Then Sharp randomly assigned roles to the actors in the room.

Narrative screenplays follow a standardized format fortheir parts (e.g., stage direction, dialogue, etc.) including short descriptions for what, where, when, and howto film the events in the story (shot headings). We created a grammar based on the syntax of shot headings toextract this and other discourse elements for automatic screenplay annotation. We test our annotator on over a thousand raw screenplays from the IMSDb screenplay corpus and make the output available for narrative intelligence research.

This project aims to compose background music in real-time for tabletop role-playing games. To accomplish this goal, we propose a system called MTG that listens to players' speeches in order to recognize the context of the current scene and generate background music to match the scene. A speech recognition system is used to transcribe players' speeches to text and a supervised learning algorithm detects when scene transitions take place. In its current version, a scene transition occurs whenever the emotional state of the narrative changes. Moreover, the background music is not generated, but selected based on its emotion from a library of hand-authored pieces. As future work, we plan to generate the background music considering the current scene context and the probability of scene transition. We also consider to retrieve more information from the narrative to detect scene transitions, such as the scene's location and time of the day as well as actions taken by characters.

With each generation, the Apple Watch's purpose has seemed to shift. The first one demonstrated what Apple thought a wearable should be, and the second tried to be the perfect workout companion. When it came time to build the Series 3, though, Apple took everything it got right with the fitness-friendly Series 2, polished it up, and threw an LTE radio inside. And lo, the $399 Apple Watch Series 3 became the first of a new breed of Apple devices -- it straddles the line between smartwatch and phone, with a dash of iPod thrown in for good measure. For those who'd rather play it safe, Apple also built a $329 Series 3 with just GPS and no cellular connection.

From color animation to RFID-enabled wristbands, the Walt Disney Company is a trailblazer of new technologies. Now, Disney's technology team is transforming its workforce to focus on Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. Here are three things we learned. "I really feel that the most transformative technology in the retail space since mobile is artificial intelligence and machine learning. These tools have the ability to change every aspect of retail, both consumer-facing and back-of-house."

It's not exactly news that Hugh Hefner, the perpetually robed Playboy founder who died Wednesday at the age of 91, is a polarizing figure. For decades Americans have disagreed about whether he should be remembered as a great liberator of Americans from their sexual puritanism or as a sexist exploiter of women. On Thursday, columnist Robin Abcarian came down strongly on the latter side, writing that although we shouldn't forget Hefner's support for smart journalism, reproductive rights and civil liberties, we should also not lose sight of the fact that his core business was the objectification of women -- mostly women under 30 -- and the exalting of exclusively male fantasies. Before Abcarian's column was published, the letters on Hefner's death reflected the typical mix of opinions we get after most notable celebrity passings: Several mentioned the existence of strong polarization over Hefner's work without taking a side, others reflected dispassionately on his work, and a few recounted their own experiences with Hefner. It was only in response to Abcarian's column that more readers started expressing stronger opinions on Hefner's work itself.

Next week the boss of one of the UK's largest banking groups will descend on Manchester, to celebrate the opening of the first of Lloyds' new super-size branches. At more than 15,000 sq ft (1,394 sq m) - and at a cost of £3m - it is the bank's most expensive branch ever, and a likely blueprint for other British cities. But while Antonio Horta Osorio will be all smiles, some of his customers may have mixed feelings. Banks may be investing heavily in mega branches in the centre of cities, but those in the suburbs are disappearing fast. In Manchester at least 23 suburban bank branches have closed - or will close - in 2017 alone.